I can’t stop thinking about the strange circumstances surrounding the tragic death of a promising young American electric engineer in Singapore two years ago.

His name was Shane Todd and his story is a cautionary tale for sanctimonious ideologues like Edward Snowden.

Unlike Snowden, Todd defended America’s secrets and doing so may have cost him his life.

While local authorities in Singapore claim that Shane committed suicide, his family is convinced he was murdered. For better or worse, so am I.

Rather than recapitulating the circumstances surrounding Todd’s death, I would refer readers to an enormously compelling piece that appeared last year in the Financial Times about Todd’s death.

Ironically, the only evidence I can add is taken from a classified diplomatic cable sent to the Central Intelligence Agency about seven years ago from a federal export controls official in China. The cable, which was made public by Wikileaks, reviews an application from a Chinese company for a license to export the technology that Shane had worked on in Singapore – a metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) epitaxial system for producing epitaxial materials like gallium nitride (GaN), a semiconductor circuit technology that offers disruptive capabilities in efficient microwave power generation.

The MOCVD at issue was made by VEECO, the same Plainview, NJ company where Shane Todd was sent to work by his sponsors in Singapore in early 2012. The export controls official expressed “strong reservations” about approving the application for an export license because of potential ties between the exporter and the Chinese military, stating:

ECO remains concerned about possible links to entities of proliferation concern and strongly recommends resolution of this issue prior to any export licensing decision. ECO further notes that the VEECO MOCVD system will be installed in one location and then re-located at a later time; accordingly, should this license be approved, ECO recommends that a Post-Shipment Verification end-use visit be requested.

Two months after this cable was written, the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency announced a new round of funding to scale production and reduce the cost of GaN-based semiconductors. Writing in Flightglobal, Stephen Trimble described the press release like so:

This press release issued yesterday may not look like much, but it announces a new project that — and I’ll word this carefully to avoid drifting into hyperbole — could forever change the world as we know it.

I’ll explain: Gallium Nitride is a semiconductor material that can transform that cell phone in your pocket into a high powered microwave transmitter. It could render the iPhone about as sophisticated as my first digital wristwatch.

The only reason it’s not in the mass market today is because manufacturing the material is so expensive that it would cost you as much to buy a cell phone as a new car (although, with the iPhone, clearly that gap is already narrowing) .

But this press release announces that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is seeking to seed the development of a low-cost manufacturing technique that will soon make Gallium Nitride far more affordable to produce. Assuming the method works, this will certainly benefit electronics consumers like you and me, but also, not least, the US military.

Military electronics already operate in the highest bands of the spectrum, but are usually powered by very large travelling wave tubes to generate the necessary voltage. Cheaper Gallium Nitride chips are the military’s ticket to the next wave of advances in radar, electronic warfare, communications and surveillance technology. It’s also fair to wonder if perhaps Gallium Nitride is the key to finally making directed energy weapons as operationally feasible as bullets, bombs and missiles.

Those with long memories may recall this has all happened once before. In the mid-1980s, DARPA seeded the development of a new manufacturing technique to lower the cost of producing Gallium Arsenide semiconductors to replace silicon. The arrival of this material made it possible to pack a transmitter powerful enough to make cellular phones possible in the first place.

A small library of similar stories have been written in the media about the disruptive potential of GaN.

Simply put, there may not be a fire, but there is enough smoke in the air around Todd’s death to sting a person’s eyes.

Americans should be ashamed of Snowden, but proud that he was able to do what he did. After all, if the United States was truly an Orwellian state, low-level bureaucrats like Snowden would never be given access to highly-classified state secrets in the first place.

By contrast, Americans should be proud of Shane Todd and ashamed of itself for not standing by him.